Pay telephone stations encounter a number of problems, from the point of view of abuse and vandalism by users and of difficulties in repairing and installing the pay telephone station. For example, a major problem which causes significant loss of revenues to the telephone company is the perpetration of coin fraud. The perpetrator usually attaches a thin strong thread or string to a coin and passes the coin into the coin slot to place a call. Typically for long distance calls or multiple local calls, several coins are required to pay the toll. Thus, when the perpetrator inserts the coin while holding the thread attached to the coin and dials, for example, the desired long distance number, the telephone company advises the caller that additional coins must be placed in the station. Instead of placing additional coins in the station the caller, having held onto the deposited coin by means of the thread which extends outside the station, simply oscillates the coin within the station the required number of times to trip the appropriate circuitry which registers and therefore counts the "coins". Numerous techniques have been proposed to prevent this type of coin fraud, but they are usually fairly complex, difficult to install or simply too expensive.
Another problem involves the handset into which the caller speaks and through which the caller hears the voice at the other end of the line. Even where vandalism does not occur, handsets incur substantial physical abuse in one form or another. Unfortunately, the handset is also subject to being pulled away from the telephone station housing whether intentionally or unintentionally. Substantial tensile forces are placed on the steel lanyard or inner cable connecting the handset to the station housing, and the connection between the two must be sufficient to prevent breakage and thereby avoid unnecessary repair. When the lanyard is broken, tensile force transferred to the flexible metal outer armor hose may unravel the same and expose sharp edges which can lead to physical harm to the user and liability to the phone company. Presently available connection systems are cumbersome to install and do not provide the requisite tensile strength needed to handle the great variety of situations which lead to the breakage of the connection between the handset and the station housing.
In terms of the configuration of the wire terminations and switches within the pay station itself, the stations currently used require time consuming connection of spaded wire terminals to screws. Given the number and variety of connections which must be made, the cost of labor involved in effecting these connections becomes inordinately high.
Pay telephone hook switch assemblies typically use a camming arrangement which is fixed to and rotated by a shaft actuated by rotation of the hook switch lever. One such arrangement uses snap-action switches which are opened and closed by two cams which differ from each other in curvature and configuration to open and close the switches in a predetermined sequence as shown in U.S. Pat. No. 4,747,134. It is currently necessary to utilize interchangeable slides or program cards to provide different timing configurations in a hook switch assembly which utilizes cam switches. This arrangement requires an inventory of slides and a time consuming operation in changing the slides when a different hook switch configuration is desired.